CONTACT US
|
ADVERTISING INFO
|
SPOTTING NOUVELLE RACISM n the eve of the ultimate non-event the mawkishly celebratory-portentious tone of the news broadcasts ("30 Straight Hours of Millennium coverage" -- Yikes!) sent me fleeing to the movie channels. One was just starting. It had a circa-1980, plastic-makeup, B-grade look. As I was about to click the remote I spotted Paul Newman and Jacqueline Bisset, two old favorites not seen in a decade. The Day Time Ended seemed an absurdly portentious title utterly unsupported by the feeble script, the bland cinematography and the dime-store special effects. But by then I was gripped by something more compelling than the film's failed attempt at suspense -- morbid curiosity. How bad a movie could a pair of fading stars be roped into?An old volcano is rumbling to life, threatening everyone on a tropical paradise. The all-white cast is augmented by five Asian/Pacific Islanders in bit parts. Two are hapless, refugee-looking kids, maybe five and seven. Among the three non-white adults is Pat Morita whose character is married to a muu-muued white woman a half foot taller and twice as heavy. In fact, Morita's near-dwarf stature -- 5-2 by my reckoning -- made all the Whites look heroic by comparison. I suspect that was the reason Morita was cast. The film certainly made no effort at drawing on Morita's considerable acting or comedic skills. The movie is remarkable because it turns out to be a textbook study of the elements that make up what I call Nouvelle Racism. In Original-Flavor Racism the ugly, false premises are overt. Asians and other minorities are blatantly portrayed as stupid, cowardly, nasty, homely, whatever. It is the concoction of an era when racists thought minorities powerless to strike back or even to raise an audible protest. Original-Flavor Racism saw its heyday during the 1940s and 50s when all three branches of the U.S. government routinely enacted, enforced and affirmed overtly racist laws like Japanese-American internment and anti-miscegenation statutes. Original-Flavor Racism is easy enough to spot and embarrass on the increasingly rare occasions when it surfaces. Thus the birth of Nouvelle Racism. In the aftermath of the Civil Rights and the multi-cultural movements of the 60s and early 70s, it stopped being profitable to push Original-Flavor Racism. Instead, like the cicada, racist impulses wormed underground and emerged as something that would fly in a world of heightened consciousness. A nouvelle racist doesn't need to toss around ugly slurs or ugly portrayals of minorities. He has learned that it's more effective to use non-verbal, implicit and subliminal techniques to convey the same sick message -- namely, that minorities are inferior. The otherwise undistinguished volcano movie is noteworthy because it blends three key elements of Nouvelle Racism. The first ingredient is to make Asians look pitiable. The movie does this by having all three Asian adults, one by one, plunge to their deaths, leaving the two Asian kids in need of rescuing by Whites. What makes this technique so effective is that it swathes the racist message in compassion. How do you protest a display of compassion? Yet the effect of consistently portraying Asians as being incapable of saving themselves, much less those who depend on them, is obvious. [CONTINUED BELOW]
The second key element of Nouvelle Racism is to undercut Asian males through slyly invidious comparison. Unusually short, homely, pockmarked and/or ineffectual Asian males are thrown cheek-by-jawl with un-credibly handsome, tall and charmingly effective white heroes. The Asians are made to die or fail or both while the white heroes succeed by virtue of superior strength, wit, charm or whatnot. In the volcano movie none of the Asians is tough or smart or lucky enough to survive the perilous route to salvation. All the whites are. "Tough break, guys!" is the overt message. The subliminal message? "Shoulda been born white!"
|
|